Martian Visitors in the Gilded Age

Over an eight-month period in 1896-1897, thousands of people across North America reported seeing mysterious ships in the air or lights in the sky. There were over 12,000 newspaper accounts published about the phenomenon in 408 different newspapers in 41 American states and six Canadian provinces. The airships were usually described as oblong, cigar-shaped objects, sometimes with wings that would flap up and down. What was going on that would have inspired so many unidentified flying object sightings? And why did they seem to cluster around an eight month period in 1896-1897? Today, in the last installment of our 2025 spooky series, we are going to dive into this late nineteenth century UFO-sighting phenomenon and perhaps figure out what was going on.

Transcript for: Martian Visitors in the Gilded Age

Written and researched by Elizabeth Garner Masarik

Produced by Averill Earls

Elizabeth: On the morning of April 19th, 1897 readers of the Dallas Morning News woke up to an article describing a strange event that occurred two days previous. According to the report, an airship had crashed in the small town of Aurora, TX, about 45 miles outside of Dallas, in the northern section of the state. The article stated that a cigar-shaped flying vehicle had whizzed over the Aurora town square before it smashed into local Judge James Proctor’s windmill. The ship exploded upon impact, destroying the windmill, the ship, and the judge’s flowerbeds.

Averill: The airship’s sole operator died in the fiery crash. Eyewitnesses described the body that was retrieved from the debris as “not an inhabitant of this world” and, per the local signal service officer, “a native of the planet Mars.” Documents found on the body appeared to be written with “some unknown hieroglyphics” but seemed to indicate some kind of flight itinerary. The article concluded with the announcement that the town would perform a Christian burial for the ship’s pilot in Aurora Cemetery the following day.

Elizabeth: Strange as it may sound to have a flying object appear seven years before the Wright brothers launched the first plane in Kittyhawk, the Aurora, TX incident was not the only sighting of a mysterious flying object that year. In fact, it was one of hundreds of such sightings reported across North America in the late 1890s.

Averill: In fact, an unidentified flying object had been observed a year earlier, in November of 1896 over San Francisco, California. Hundreds of people reported seeing an airship traveling “against the wind” and using “searchlights” as it flew through the air. Later, inhabitants of Santa Rosa and Sacramento reported seeing the same flying craft.

Elizabeth: Throngs of people reported seeing a flying craft over Chicago, Illinois on April 10th, 1897 and residents of Alma, Michigan reported seeing a similar ship over Lake Michigan the next night. They described this airship as having red, blue, and green flashing lights.

Averill: Over an eight-month period in 1896-1897, thousands of people across North America reported seeing mysterious ships in the air or lights in the sky. There were over 12,000 newspaper accounts published about the phenomenon in 408 different newspapers in 41 American states and six Canadian provinces.^[1] The airships were usually described as oblong, cigar-shaped objects, sometimes with wings that would flap up and down.

Chicago Times report on the airship sighting of 10th April 1897

Elizabeth: What was going on that would have inspired so many unidentified flying object sightings? And why did they seem to cluster around an eight month period in 1896-1897? Today, in the last installment of our 2025 spooky series, we are going to dive into this late nineteenth century UFO-sighting phenomenon and perhaps figure out what was going on.

I’m Elizabeth

And I’m Averill

And we are your historians of this episode of Dig.

Averill: Patreon: We are so thankful for all of our Patreon supporters – especially our Auger and Excavator level patrons: Karl, Alissa, Maria, Colin, Denise, Edward, Jessy, Judy, Karen, Lauren, Lisa, Megan, and Susan! We can’t thank you enough. Listener, if you enjoy what we do here but aren’t yet a patron of this show, it’s easy: just go to patreon.com/digpodcast to learn more.

Elizabeth: As always, I want to acknowledge that the work we do on this podcast is built on and out of the scholarship of other historians and scholars. Like Marissa’s episode about Werewolves in this same series, the phenomenon of Gilded Age airship sightings and Martian landings is not a topic that has been readily covered in traditional academic sources. I do want to acknowledge that I had never heard of this phenomenon until I received a newsletter update from Find-A-Grave.com that highlighted the cemetery in Aurora, TX that potentially houses Martian remains. That article peaked my interest and I went down some weeeirrrd rabbit holes in researching this episode. I found the recently published book The Martians: The True Story of an Alien Craze that Captured Turn-of-the-Century America, by journalist David Baron to be helpful. Thanks to historian Cathleen Cahill to hipping me to that one. I found the most help on the Library of Congress website that hosts quite a few articles and primary source documents dealing with this Gilded Age phenomenon. Digitized newspaper articles proved a wealth of information on the topic. You can go digpodcast.org to look through the bibliography and show notes for this episode to learn more.

Texas Historical Commission Sign at Aurora Cemetery, Aurora TX

Averill: In 1831 the astronomy textbook, The Young Astronomer, taught young learners that “To the people who live on Mars, this earth probably appears larger than Mars does to us.”^[2] The textbook wasn’t just figurative language. During the 1830s, many astronomers believed that Mars, other planets, and even the sun harbored inhabitants.

Elizabeth: Throughout the nineteenth century, telescopes were improving quickly and our understanding of Mars evolved alongside improvements in the instruments used to examine it. These advances enabled astronomers to observe and draw details of planets, particularly Mars, that had not previously been visible. Simultaneously and perhaps not coincidentally, many people believed that our solar system was likely full of inhabited planets, and Mars in particular seemed a logical planet to be inhabited by alien lifeforms.

Averill: Furthermore, as the view of Mars sharpened, parallels between the Red Planet and Earth, particularly the assumption that the planet’s dark regions were oceans, fueled speculation about the potential for life there.

Elizabeth: In his 1838 book Celestial Scenery, or, The Wonders of the Planetary System Displayed, astronomer Thomas Dick postulated that “There is land and water analogues to those on our globe” and that one third to one fourth of Mars was covered with water.”^[3] He proposed that the physical and ethical circumstances of Mars’ inhabitants might closely resemble those of Earth’s residents since the environments of both planets seemed to have similarities.

Averill: By the 1860s, the concept of extraterrestrial life had gained traction through the works of French writer and astronomer Camille Flammarion. His 1862 book The Plurality of Inhabited Worlds inspired more interest in the potential of life on Mars. English versions of books such as The Wonders of the Heavens from 1871 and the 1904 book Astronomy for Amateurs popularized Flammarion’s concepts and the potential for life on Mars.

Elizabeth: Flammarion extensively examined the presence of water and ice on Mars. His work, combined with early Martian cartography and astronomers’ interpretations of the planet’s reflected light, convinced a lot of scientists and astronomers that Mars had large bodies of water, like oceans or seas.

Averill: Astronomer Elias Colbert stated in his 1871 work Star-Studies: What we Know of the Universe Outside the Earth that Mars is “adapted as a residence for rational beings, like ourselves; and it may be that they have attained to a higher stage of mental development than we have, for the double reason that the planet appears to have been habitable some thousands of years longer than our Earth, and also that the extremes of temperature are greater—the latter stimulating inventive ingenuity, as in a lesser degree than ourselves.”^[4]

Elizabeth: In discussing the planet’s temperature in relation to intelligence, Colbert was referencing nineteenth-century anthropological theories that claimed European societies were more developed because milder climates had allowed them to grow stronger and smarter as a race. Thus according to this theory, Mars being colder likely developed an ancient technological society that surpassed Earth’s. This is also the gross theory that supported racist assumptions that races of people from hot climates were “lazy” and better suited to agricultural work.^[5]

Averill: When astronomer and popular writer Richard Proctor published a map of Mars in his 1874 book Flowers in the Sky that depicted oceans and landmasses on the surface of the planet, he intended viewers to draw parallels with Earth’s continents and seas. The map’s layout closely mirrored contemporary world maps, showing the earth as a deconstructed globe with continental masses among large oceans. Procter’s maps led readers to accept Mars’s oceans as reality and strengthened the perception that the planet could be, and probably was, a populated world.

Elizabeth: Furthermore, advancements in spectroscopy supported the claim that Mars was covered in large bodies of water. In 1859, Gustav Kirchhoff and Robert Bunsen were able to analyze dark spots within the light spectrum produced by burning various chemicals. Kirchhoff and Bunsen discovered that each element produces a distinct pattern of dark lines, called spectroscopy.

Averill: Spectroscopy became vital to understanding the makeup of the solar system because scientists were able to interpret the light spectrum from celestial objects as a chemical signature, showing the make-up or composition of space objects. In 1871 Elias Colbert, assistant director of the Dearborn Observatory, analyzed Mars’s light spectrum and revealed that the planet contained substantial quantities of water. He suggested that “Mars is, therefore, adapted as a residence for rational beings, like ourselves” and came to the teleological assumption that the Martians had likely “attained to a higher state of mental development than we have.”^[6]

Elizabeth: However, the use of spectroscopy to draw conclusions about Mars’ water content in the 1870s was wrong, not because spectroscopy can’t be used for celestial bodies, but because the data collection methods and the conclusions derived from the 1870s studies were using incorrect data. But they didn’t know that yet and the belief that large bodies of water and possible inhabitants on Mars lived on.

Averill: In 1877, during a year when Mars’ orbit was aligned particularly close to Earth, Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli observed Mars through his telescope night after night. Since Mars rotates on its axis approximately once every 24 hours like Earth, he watched features appear and disappear from view and he determined that Mars appeared to have oceans and landmasses similar to Earth.

Elizabeth: Schiaparelli drew a map of Mars that depicted a network of sharply defined straight lines crossing the planet. Schiaparelli observed what he believed were extremely thin straight lines traversing the planet. He presumed they were waterways and called them “canali,” meaning channels in Italian, but the word was mistranslated into English as canals.

Averill: Schiaparelli’s maps and drawings were very detailed and other astronomers couldn’t produce such precise-looking charts. His apparent precision lent his work a sense of credibility. In 1886, multiple astronomers corroborated Schiaparelli’s observations of Mars, and deciphering these canals became a significant matter. Unlike the oceans, the canals appeared to provide unmistakable signs of extraterrestrial engineering on Mars’s surface. While the Martian oceans had hinted at the potential for life on the planet, the canals seemed to furnish concrete proof that intelligent beings had manipulated the surface of the planet.

*Giovanni Schiaparelli’s Map of Mars (Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons).*

Elizabeth: This phenomenon in which Mars is in its closest approach to Earth is called opposition. When this was happening in the 1890s, interest in Mars soared as it was now easier to view it through rudimentary telescopes. Also, many astronomers, amateur and serious alike, witnessed bright flashes on the planet’s surface. These were especially visible to those observing the planet in France, causing the phenomenon of “Martian signal lights” to heighten the public’s fascination.

Averill: In 1891, French astronomer Camille Flammarion announced the creation of the Guzman Prize—a substantial sum left to the French Academy of Sciences to reward “the person of whatever nation who will find the means within the next ten years of communicating with a star (planet or otherwise) and of receiving a response.” The donor even considered excluding Mars from the competition, thinking that communicating with Martians would be “too easy.” Flammarion also published The Planet Mars the next year, which compiled archival research and historical literature bolstering the idea that Mars was an inhabited planet.

Elizabeth: During the favorable 1892 opposition, astronomer W.H. Pickering discovered many small, round dark spots appearing at each junction or origin point of the “canals,” further supporting theories about intelligent beings on Mars. However, not everyone was convinced.

Averill: Astronomer George Davidson of the Lick Observatory in California called out what he determined was nonsense, saying to the San Francisco Call “Mars inhabited? Pshaw! Do you know that every true astronomer has been very sorry to see all this haberdash that some of the newspapers have been printing about Mars being inhabited and our seeing canals on the surface, and all that other rot and nonsense.”^[7]

Elizabeth: Astronomers were divided: some accepted the canal hypothesis while others attributed the findings to visual errors and exaggeration. By 1894, questions arose about whether Mars had any oceans, since what had been called “seas” looked more like highlands when examined under good viewing conditions. Newspapers continued to report on astronomical observations and lights and stated theories about alien life on Mars as a foregone conclusion.

Averill: Percival Lowell, an affluent member of Boston’s prominent Lowell family (aka the Lowell Mills and the town named after his family) was captivated by Giovanni Schiaparelli’s illustrations of Martian “canali.” Lowell had received one of Camille Flammarion’s books about Mars as a Christmas gift in 1893, which explored the canals and Flammarion’s theory that the canals could indicate intelligent beings. After reading the book, Lowell developed an intense preoccupation with Mars and decided to use his fortune to investigate. During the winter of 1893-94, Lowell committed himself to astronomical research and decided to build an observatory devoted to observing Mars.

Elizabeth: Lowell enlisted astronomer Andrew Douglass to locate an appropriate site for the observatory. In February 1894, Douglass traveled through Arizona, evaluating different locations. By April, he reached Flagstaff and discovered excellent viewing conditions. Lowell and Douglass selected Flagstaff due to its high elevation (exceeding 7,000 feet), minimal light pollution, and railroad access.

Averill: The town donated five acres for the observatory, and construction was expedited. Lowell began systematic Mars observations using two refracting telescopes. He wrote articles in popular publications such as The Atlantic Monthly, Scientific American, and Century Magazine, that attracted widespread public interest with his assertions that the Martian canals indicated the presence of intelligent life on the planet.

Elizabeth: Writer H.G. Wells was also influenced by the close approach of Mars to Earth in the 1890s and the ongoing Martian craze that had been exciting readers since Schaparelli’s “discovery” of the Mars canals. Wells created a serialized story, The War of the Worlds, in which he imagined squid-like Martians in robotic suits as superior beings who were living on a planet that was exhausted, thus forcing them to seek inhabitable lands on Earth. The War of the Worlds depicted the Martians as hostile invaders that should be feared by the inhabitants of Earth. The story was serialized in Pearson’s Magazine in the UK and Cosmopolitan magazine in the U.S. in 1897, and printed as a novel in hardback in 1898.

Averill: Only six weeks after publication, an unauthorized follow-up titled “Edison’s Conquest of Mars” was published by Garrett P. Serviss, and featured Thomas Edison leading a retaliatory strike against the invaders. In this story, Thomas Edison leads the effort to bring the battle to the Martians. The complete story appeared across ten Sunday installments of The Los Angeles Herald.

Elizabeth: “Edison’s Conquest of Earth” opens after the Martian devastation of Earth depicted in The War of the Worlds. Convinced the Martians will attack again, Queen Victoria, the Kaiser, and the Emperor of Japan convene in Washington D.C. to strategize. Earth’s scientists, led by inventor Thomas Edison, receive substantial funding to develop weapons. By studying Martian technology, Edison creates a disintegrator ray and an antigravity device. With these innovations, a fleet of 100 spaceships launches an assault on Mars. Edison’s forces destroy the planet’s water distribution system, a canal network based on Schiaparelli and Lowell’s observations, flooding Mars and killing millions. When surrender negotiations collapsed, the Earth delegation disintegrated the Martian emperor.

The Herald (Los Angeles), February 6, 1898

Averill: The burgeoning field of science fiction writing was not the only place where Mars mania was prevalent. A catchy dance called “A Signal from Mars” swept the nation, while Broadway featured shows with Martian themes, including “A Message from Mars” and a vaudeville act starring Mrs. Tom Thumb (Lavinia Warren) titled “A Peep at Mars.” The public approached the Martian theory with a sense of whimsy, as biologists earnestly debated whether Martians possessed wings or gills, and advertisers capitalized on the craze with colorful posters depicting Martians requesting earthly products like Pears’ Soap.

Elizabeth: Newspapers regularly covered astronomical observations and mysterious lights that prompted speculation about alien signals. The rise of sensationalistic yellow journalism, dominated by newspaper magnates like Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst, created an insatiable appetite for dramatic stories that prioritized attention-grabbing headlines over factual accuracy. The era coincided with a wave of technological innovation and exploration that fueled public optimism about humanity’s boundless potential, including the Wright brothers’ pioneering flights and expeditions to the North Pole.

Averill: During the period from the 1880s until World War I, Spiritualists reported regular contact with Martian spirits through séances, with some individuals claiming to have visited the Red Planet as “disembodied souls” via astral projection. In 1886, bestselling fiction-writer Marie Corelli published A Romance of Two Worlds, which featured a protagonist undertaking an astral journey through the heavens.

Elizabeth: In December 1900, a group led by Dorothea Hunter, aka Soror Deo Date, a member of The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, an elite occult order that launched Aleister Crowley’s career, conducted a séance to “investigate clairvoyantly” and claimed to have made astral visits to Mars during a period when “Mars was in Virgo at the time.”^[8]

Averill: It’s important to point out that some of the astronomers that were convinced there was life on Mars, were also interested in the occult or at least the outer realms of human understanding. Percival Lowell had been a paranormal researcher before he was an astronomer. He had previously written a book, Occult Japan, in which he tried to provide psychological and material explanations for accounts of divine possession. And Flammarion, mentioned earlier, became the president for the International Society for Psychical Research and stated in his inaugural address that “Telepathy is as much a fact as are London, Sirius and oxygen.”^[9]

Elizabeth: On January 16, 1901, the New York Times published a report claiming that Harvard’s Lowell Observatory had detected a 70-second beam of light emanating from Mars that appeared to be deliberately aimed, leading many to interpret it as an intentional message from Martian civilization, fueling existing fascination with the possibility of communicating with beings on the Red Planet.

Averill: The most notable claim of Martian contact came from inventor Nikola Tesla, who in 1899, while conducting radio experiments at his Colorado Springs laboratory, reported receiving enigmatic signals he attributed to Mars. In 1901, Tesla published an account in Collier’s Weekly describing how his “first observations positively terrified me, as there was present in them something mysterious, not to say supernatural, and I was alone in my laboratory at night.”

Elizabeth: He informed the press that he had identified “feeble electrical disturbances which by their character unmistakably showed that they were neither of solar origin nor produced by any causes known to me on the globe.” Many scientists ridiculed Tesla’s claims, arguing that such signals could not penetrate Earth’s ionosphere.^[10] However, research conducted in 2003 indicated that Tesla may have actually intercepted radio emissions from Jupiter rather than Mars.

Averill: In 1907, Lowell put substantial financial resources toward photographing the Martian canals. He believed the photographs he captured would conclusively prove the canals’ existence because in his view, the photographs removed any uncertainty about the existence of the canals. However, by allowing others to interpret the photos that had been the inspiration for his planetary maps, the images inadvertently undermined his credibility because the photos were quite blurry. The meticulously drawn maps by Schiaparelli had possessed a certain clarity that lent legitimacy to the canal theory, but photography exposed the deeply subjective nature of the earlier cartographic interpretations.

Elizabeth: While the canals seemed unmistakable to Schiaparelli and Lowell, the photographic evidence failed to persuade other observers. As contradictory evidence accumulated, public opinion gradually shifted away from the canal hypothesis, though the prospect of extraterrestrial life continued to captivate the imaginations of many people.

Averill: Many Americans, including Alexander Graham Bell, found Lowell’s arguments and photographic evidence persuasive. Bell wrote an eight-page letter to his wife and concluded that, “there is no escape from the conviction that Mars is inhabited by a highly civilized and intelligent race of beings carrying on a process of agriculture, and wringing subsistence.”^[11]

Elizabeth: A cover feature titled “Mars Inhabited?” in the March 1907 issue of Cosmopolitan offered perspectives from both H.G. Wells and Professor David Todd, who had taken part in Percival Lowell’s 1907 expedition to photograph the canals of Mars. Wells’ contribution carried an extensive but descriptive title: “The Things that Live on Mars: A description, based upon scientific reasoning, of the flora and fauna of our neighboring planet. In conformity with the very latest astronomical revelations.” Unlike his fictional works such as War of the Worlds, this piece was presented as rigorous and logical speculation about Martian life.

Averill: Wells emphasized that “Wild and extravagant as these dim visions of unseen creatures may seem, it is logic and ascertained fact that forces us toward the belief that some such creatures are living now.” For Wells, the existence of an advanced, technologically sophisticated civilization on Mars was beyond dispute. His essay represented a serious attempt to apply scientific reasoning to the question of extraterrestrial life, reflecting the era’s widespread conviction that astronomical observations had provided definitive proof of intelligent beings on the Red Planet.^[12]

Elizabeth: Edgar Rice Burroughs, best known as the creator of Tarzan, wrote a series of adventure novels set on a fictional Mars called Barsoom, which became foundational to the development of science fiction. The first Barsoom tale was serialized as “Under the Moons of Mars” in the pulp magazine The All-Story from February to July 1912 and later published as a complete novel titled A Princess of Mars in 1917. The story featured John Carter, an American Civil War Confederate veteran who is mysteriously transported from Earth to the dying world of Mars, where he encounters and falls in love with the beautiful Martian princess Dejah Thoris. Over the next three decades, Burroughs produced ten sequels that expanded his vision of Barsoom and John Carter, a story and character that are still popular today.

Averill: After the outbreak of World War I, a lavishly illustrated full-page piece appeared in the January 10, 1915 edition of the Washington Herald, asking readers, “What do the Martians think of us now?” The essay imagined how Martians from a technologically advanced civilization would view the people of Earth engaging in senseless violence like the Great War. After describing what the conflict might look like to Martian observers, the author concluded, “It’s a pretty mess that the Martians may see upon the face of old Mother Earth.” This editorial used the possibility of an advanced Martian civilization as a mirror to reflect on humanity’s own failings, questioning whether Martians realized “that a war is going on full swing on old planet Earth” or whether, “being the occupants of an older planet, have they progressed so far in intelligence and civilization that they have actually forgotten there can be such a thing as war?”^[13]

Elizabeth: The underlying argument was that intelligence and progress would naturally lead to a world where the concept of war might disappear entirely. The author imagined that the advancement of Martian civilization would have resulted in a peaceful society, explaining that “All their tribal, national and racial wars were fought out long ago. Their interest, surprise and disgust toward Earth at this time must be tremendous. If they have any word worse than ‘barbarians’ they have unquestionably been hurling it down at us night and day for the past five months.” In this context, Martians became a rhetorical device for gaining perspective on earthly conflicts, allowing readers to distance themselves from the immediate war.

The San Francisco Call (San Francisco), January 6, 1907

Averill: Mars excitement reached its peak when Lowell funded an expensive expedition to photograph Mars from Chile’s Atacama Desert, producing images that newspapers proclaimed as definitive proof of the Martian canals. However, this apparent triumph quickly transformed into disaster. The bold claims and highly speculative photographs emboldened Lowell’s critics, whose harsh attacks ultimately destroyed Lowell and his theory. He suffered delusions and nervous depression due to his downfall and died shortly thereafter in 1916.

Elizabeth: FYI- NASA’s 1964 Mariner IV photographed Mars and found that there were no canals on the planet. What had been interpreted as intelligently-made canals were only optical illusions.

Averill: In 1920, Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi, considered a pioneer in radio, made a startling claim that captivated the public imagination. Marconi announced that he had encountered “during my experiments with wireless telegraphy a most amazing phenomenon,” stating “I believe it is entirely possible that these signals may have been sent by the inhabitants of other planets to the inhabitants of earth.” Marconi began telling newspapers about “strange sounds” in his transmissions that he described as “distinct, unintelligible” messages rather than random noise that resembled Morse-code. He attributed the sounds to “the space beyond our planet.” Newspapers eagerly ran these stories alongside illustrations of Martians operating their own radios beneath starry skies.^[14]

“Hello Earth” The Tomahawk. (White Earth, Becker County, Minn.) March 18, 1920

Elizabeth: Marconi later disputed some of these accounts, blaming “reportorial enthusiasm” for crediting him with “saying and doing things I never thought of saying or dreamed of doing.” Nevertheless, the public’s fascination persisted and many were wondering if the new radio technology knitting together previously isolated communities could soon reach up to space.

Averill: This enthusiasm reached a fever pitch in August 1924, when Mars again approached unusually close to Earth. Curtis D. Wilbur, Secretary of the U.S. Navy, believed it might be possible to actually hear messages from Mars and sent orders to every naval station across the country instructing operators to monitor for anything unusual. A telegram read: “Navy desires cooperation with astronomers who believe possible that Mars may attempt communication by radio waves with this planet while they are near together. All shore radio stations will especially note and report any electrical phenomenon of unusual character…” The orders requested that lines remain open and carefully manned between August 21 and August 24. Scientists at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, England, also installed a listening team.

Elizabeth: While average Americans couldn’t listen in to the radio signals themselves, they still wanted to witness the historic moment. Across the country, people flooded observatories in hopes of catching a glimpse of Martian activity. More than 300 visitors crowded the observatory at Drake University in Iowa, expecting to see canal boats and mules on the Red Planet’s surface. Many were disappointed to observe little more than a “reddish colored splotch” through the eyepiece.

Averill: The university’s president complained that the public “expects too much from a telescope,” though he maintained that “We have as much reason to believe that Mars is inhabited as the Earth.” The opposition came and went with no extraterrestrial message materializing. As far as anyone could determine, the Navy’s days of radio silence yielded nothing but static, and the British scientists at Greenwich fared no better.

Elizabeth: So what about that Martian crash in Aurora, Texas that we started the episode off with? According to reports, wreckage from the crash site was dumped into a nearby well located beneath the damaged windmill, while some debris ended up buried with the alien in its grave. The mystery deepened with the story of Mr. Brawley Oates, who purchased Judge Proctor’s property around 1935. Oates cleaned out the debris from the well to use it as a water source, but later developed an extremely severe case of arthritis, which he attributed to contaminated water from the wreckage that had been dumped into the well. Whether the Aurora incident was an elaborate hoax, a misidentification, or something more mysterious remains a topic of debate.

Averill: The entire airship mystery was largely explained away by a very down-to-earth theory: S. E. Haydon, the writer of the original 1897 article, had invented the whole thing to boost interest in a dying town.

Elizabeth: The hoax theory is primarily based on a 1979 Time magazine interview with Etta Pegues, an 86-year-old Aurora resident. At that time, Aurora, Texas had a population of just 237. Pegues claimed that Haydon had fabricated the entire story, stating that he “wrote it as a joke and to bring interest to Aurora. The railroad bypassed us, and the town was dying.” She further asserted that Judge Proctor never operated a windmill on his property, undermining one of the key details of the original account.

Averill: If Pegues’s testimony is accurate, the spaceship landing in Aurora was just another example of sensationalist journalism in the late 19th century, indicative of a broader pattern of late 19th-century media practices that often prioritized dramatic storytelling over accuracy.

Elizabeth: Despite the hoax claims, the alleged airship pilot’s grave became a local attraction over the decades. He became affectionately known as “Little Traveler,” or simply “Ned.” At some point, a tombstone etched with a crude spaceship drawing was placed where his grave was thought to be located. When that tombstone later disappeared, it was replaced with a boulder where visitors left gifts in his memory.

2015 Headstone in Aurora Cemetery, Aurora, TX. Photo via graver, Find-A-Grave.com

Averill: The Aurora incident continued to capture public imagination. In 1998, Dallas-based TV station KDFW aired a lengthy report about the incident, with reporter Richard Ray interviewing former Fort Worth Star Telegram reporter Jim Marrs and other locals who maintained that something had crashed in Aurora. The story gained further attention when UFO Files aired an episode titled “Texas’ Roswell” on December 19, 2005, examining the case in detail.

Elizabeth: On November 19, 2008, UFO Hunters broadcast another television documentary about the Aurora incident, titled “First Contact,” in which the Aurora Cemetery was again examined. Although the cemetery association still refused to permit exhumation, investigators used ground-penetrating radar and photos from prior visits to locate an unmarked grave in the area near other 1890s burial sites. However, the condition of the grave was badly deteriorated, and the radar could not conclusively determine what type of remains existed beneath the surface.

Averill: But what about the hundreds of other sightings during 1896-1897? They all remain inconclusive too. Explained away as sightings of meteor showers and overactive imaginations.

Elizabeth: But did people really see something? Or was it just Mars fever? We will let you be the judge.

Averill: The late 19th century Mars fixation collapsed with surprising speed as more scientific scrutiny emerged, supported by advances in telescope technology. What had once seemed like undeniable evidence of an advanced Martian civilization was gradually revealed to be optical illusions and wishful thinking.

Elizabeth: However, this didn’t curtail earthlings interest in the Red Planet. The Barroom John Carpenter series and Wells’ War of the World continued to be popular early science fiction books. And of course, the UFO craze of the mid twentieth-century with conspiracies about Rosewell, New Mexico and Area 51 prove that the fascination with Martian visitors has never really gone away.

Averill: That’s it for today. Thanks for listening.

Elizabeth: Visit us at digpodcast.org for show notes and a bibliography for this episode and all of our episodes. If you’re an educator, we’ve got a compendium of episodes you can use in the classroom – and free teaching resources, including full lesson plans! – on our website, digpodcast.org. You’ll also find full bibliographies, the scripts for all of our episodes, resources, and a link to our swag store and our bookshop at digpodcast.org.

Averill: We invite you to follow us on BlueSky and Instagram at dig_history. If you have a comment or question or want to share some kind words with us, you can always email us at hello@digpodcast.org – we love listener mail!

Notes

^[1] Jason Charbonneau, “From Ufology to Mythology: The Case of the Mystery Airships of the US Southwest 1896-1897,” presentation at Trent University, Canada, May 27, 2017. https://youtu.be/SGplwRUSW5I?si=JHMxJ3qqNi_qu8LG

^[2] Library of Congress, “Seeing and Interpreting Martian Oceans and Canals.”

^[3] Library of Congress, “Seeing and Interpreting Martian Oceans and Canals.”

^[4] Library of Congress, “Seeing and Interpreting Martian Oceans and Canals.”

^[5] Clif Stratton Education for Empire, chp 1 has great coverage of this theory.

^[6] Library of Congress, “Seeing and Interpreting Martian Oceans and Canals.”

^[7] The Morning Call (San Francisco [Calif.]), August 4, 1892

^[8] Alex Owen, The Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern, 156.

^[9] Felix Gilman, The Story of a Victorian Group Who Tried to Travel to Space Using Supernatural Powers; Owen, The Place of Enchantment, 120.

^[10] Library of Congress, “Tesla Promises Radio Contact with Mars.”

^[11] Letter from Alexander Graham Bell to Mabel Hubbard Bell, November 29, 1909. Library of Congress, Manuscript Division.

^[12] Wells & Leigh, “The Things that Live on Mars.”

^[13] Library of Congress, “Envisioning Martian Civilization.”